A router is usually designed to perform one or more basic networking tasks. One basic networking task is maintaining statistics. FIG. 1 illustrates one embodiment of a conventional router. The router includes a processor and a statistics module. The statistics module is a memory device that maintains various statistics of data switched at the router. The statistics module is typically a Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) device.
The problem with the statistics module is that four or more physical SRAM devices may be necessary to support the magnitude of statistics that are maintained. This is attributed to the high speed (e.g., 125 million packets per second) at which the router may operate.
However, SRAM devices are expensive and physically large relative to Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) devices. DRAM devices, nevertheless, typically cannot operate at a sufficient speed to support statistics at the router.